What card best represents your personality?

My last several posts have discussed how the most frequently pulled cards represent my personality, and how they also happened to be my most favorite and most dreaded cards.

As 2014 has just closed, let me reference a personality system designed by the late Angeles Arrien, cultural anthropologist, whose last chapter also closed in 2014. In addition to researching the cross-cultural symbols in the Thoth tarot deck, she presented a technique using numerology in which in the day, month and year of one’s birth could be used to point to cards to represent soul and personality. I fall into a generation where the numbers correspond to one card for both.

According to Arrien’s technique, then, the seventh major arcana (VII Chariot) represents my soul and personality, and I find this special connection to the card to be useful. The image of the figure in golden armor sitting lotus-style in a fiery red chariot drawn by changelings, while holding the Holy Grail suggests that the motion, transformation, and the substance of collaboration of my life would arise mostly from reflective inner work. This possibility is intriguing because this is an era of using external methods to progress and to measure progress. The fact that this card is among the major arcana suggests that there is room in this world for that which the card represents. As someone who does actually operate this way, meditation on this card is reassuring.